How to establish ties with the industry as a young engineering professor?

First, Congratulations!

Second, I see you are in Canada.

The first thing you should do is join your local Canadian Society of Civil Engineering chapter. Become a member, and attend their events (this may include dinner meetings, speakers, tours, etc.). Talk to people: start with "Hi, I'm Dr. X and a new professor in Civil Engineering at the U of X, where do you work, what do you do?" Get to know the local executive of the CSCE, offer to do a talk about what you do.

Attend the CSCE conferences. There are many practitioners there who are presenting on their most technical and most research-y work. Get to know them, they might like to collaborate.

Next, make sure you are on the mailing list for the local chapter of your provincial engineering association. Go to their events. Offer to do a talk for them (at lunch meetings, annual events, etc.). They also likely host professional development workshops, another great way to meet practitioners.

At these events and though your colleges and students, find out which consulting firms do projects that are closest to your research area. Find people that work there at local engineering events. Great ways to get to know a firm as a researcher is "Hey, I am teaching a class on (insert topic here) do you have any interesting case studies I could use to illustrate (insert concept here)."

Finally, (as Mad jack says) in engineering programs in Canadian universities, students often must complete a capstone design project. Find out how your department handles that, and if you will be involved. Perhaps volunteer to mentor a group. Then at local meetings you can say "next year I will be mentoring some fourth years students doing a capstone project in (insert discipline here), do you guys have anything interesting coming up that would be suitable for a fourth year group to tackle?" Then make sure your students do a damn good job.

One way, based on my experience, is to form connections through your students' internships. This gets you an "in" with the company, so that you can network and potentially collaborate.

For example, my advisor got invited to give talks at two of the companies I interned at. He collaborated on projects with both companies and even received funding from one of them.

This is at core a question about networking, so the standard advice on that applies: meet as many people as possible, show interest in what they're working on, ask for introductions, and actively look for ways your expertise might benefit them. Be proactive and discard shyness.

To expand on Austin's great answer, you can search yourself for internships with related companies and bring them to the attention of students who might be interested. Many students are interested in internships, but don't really know where to start. If you have trouble finding related internships, you might consider cold contacting larger companies to help create internships--make a business case for why they should want to do it, then help them set it up.

You can also work with the career office at your university and get involved with recent grads looking for work. Connect with former students (on LinkedIn for example) and network through them both to help later students also find work, and to connect with companies you're interested in.

Additionally most major professional fields have meetups in major cities and professional organizations. Go to places like Meetup.com for meetups and google for professional organizations with conferences you can join. Get on as many mailing lists as you can, so that you can attend as many events as possible. Short of that, look for entrepreneurial and startup organizations where you can meet people with novel engineering problems.

You can also look for people to contact on the author lists for published patents or research papers from labs working on things you're interested in. Cold contacting people is scary and has a lower success rate per contact attempt than networking, but it can work. The pro is that it's something you can make progress on at any time whereas networking can only be done at meetups and such where people are available.